European Integration and its Different Guises across Europe: A Subdimensional Perspective on Mass–Elite Discrepancy (original) (raw)
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Europe Divided?Elites vs. Public Opinion on European Integration
European Union Politics, 2003
Das Institut für Höhere Studien (IHS) wurde im Jahr 1963 von zwei prominenten Exilösterreicherndem Soziologen Paul F. Lazarsfeld und dem Ökonomen Oskar Morgenstern -mit Hilfe der Ford-Stiftung, des Österreichischen Bundesministeriums für Unterricht und der Stadt Wien gegründet und ist somit die erste nachuniversitäre Lehr-und Forschungsstätte für die Sozial-und Wirtschaftswissenschaften in Österreich. Die Reihe Politikwissenschaft bietet Einblick in die Forschungsarbeit der Abteilung für Politikwissenschaft und verfolgt das Ziel, abteilungsinterne Diskussionsbeiträge einer breiteren fachinternen Öffentlichkeit zugänglich zu machen. Die inhaltliche Verantwortung für die veröffentlichten Beiträge liegt bei den Autoren und Autorinnen. Gastbeiträge werden als solche gekennzeichnet.
2003
This article compares preferences for Europeanizing thirteen policies among European elites, national elites, and public opinion. Elites are more willing to cede national authority in sovereignty areas, but citizens are more favorable to EU social policies. Are there contrasting logics at work? The answer is two-sided. Elites and public preferences are similar in that both are least enthusiastic about Europeanizing high-spending policies. Here is a common distributional logic: shifting authority could de-stabilize vested interests. However, as the single market intensifies labor market volatility, the public seeks to contain this distributional risk through selectively Europeanizing market-flanking policies. In contrast, elite preferences are consistent with a functional rationale, which conceives European integration as an optimal solution for internalizing externalities beyond the national state.
The Politicization of European Integration: More than an Elite Affair?
2016
A growing literature in research on the European Union (EU) claims that European integration has become comprehensively politicized in the EU’s population. The most convincing evidence for this assertion stems from research on political and societal elites – studies of party manifestos, interest groups ’ activities, news media reporting and the like. By contrast, evidence on politicization trends in the broader citizenry is much more ambiguous.This article raises the question of whether politicization is more than an elite phenomenon. Based on a differentiated conception of politicization, it analyzes focus groups conducted with EU citizens in four member states. It shows that, for most citizens, only the fundamentals of European integration have gained political saliency, while the EU’s day-to-day activities remain largely non-politicized. In addition, patterns of politicization in the European population are conditioned by significant knowledge deficits.
While the European Union has recently celebrated 60 years since its founding treaty was signed in Rome on March 25 1957, the European project seems to have entered a critical stage. Brexit is only the most recent development in a series of political controversies that reflect the challenges and problems the European integration process has faced since the mid 2000s when the Constitutional Treaty was rejected in two national referendums in France and the Netherlands. Political conflict over European integration became even more evident in the aftermath of the economic crisis. The rise of EU contestation is indicated by increasing levels of Euroscepticism among citizens, relatively favorable outcomes of Eurosceptic parties in national and European elections, public controversies on political strategies designed to cope with the euro crisis and more recently to deal with the refugees’ crisis. All these developments seem to suggest an increasing split between citizens and the elites that have led the European integration process since the beginning (Tătar, 2010). Against this background, the book edited by Swen Hutter, Edgar Grande and Hanspeter Kriesi assumes that a focus on the “politicization of Europe, both as an analytical concept and a political strategy is key to an understanding of the acute problems that the European integration project faces today” (p. xvi). The book is the result of a long-term collaborative research project that focuses on the development of political conflict over European integration in six west European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK). The study follows every important step of European integration for more than four decades, from the early 1970s to the euro crisis in 2012.
Elite views on European Institutions. With Daniel Gaxie
BOOK ABSTRACT: Draws from a unique transnational database, the results of a major research project. Contributors include some leading researchers in the field It has been widely acknowledged that the process of European integration and unification was started and is still pursued as an elite project, designed to put an end to debilitating conflicts and rivalries by consolidating a common power base and by pooling Europe's economic resources. Nevertheless elites have remained the known unknowns of the European integration process. The present volume is designed to change this. Based on surveys of political and economic elites in 18 European countries, it is a comprehensive study of the visions, fears, cognitions and values of members of national parliaments and top business leaders underlying their attitudes towards European integration. It also investigates political and economic elites' embeddedness in transnational networks and their ability to communicate in multicultural settings. The book strongly supports the view of an elitist character of the process of European integration on the one hand, while challenging the idea that European national elites have merged or are even merging into a coherent Eurelite on the other. As the 11 chapters of this book show the process of European integration is much more colourful and even contradictory than concepts of a straight forward normative and structural integration suggest. In particular this process is deeply rooted in, and conditional on, the social and political settings in national contexts. The empirical basis for this book is provided by the data of the international IntUne project, which has for the first time created a comprehensive database combining coordinated surveys of Europe-related attitudes at the elite and general population level. Readership: Scholars and students of political science, EU studies, European integration, comparative politics, political behaviour, and political sociology.
»Auf Kurs in turbulenten Zeiten: Die nationalen politischen Eliten und die Krise der europäischen Integration«. European Integration is currently facing tremendous challenges caused by a series of cumulating crises. Their on- set was the global financial and economic crisis in 2008 that rapidly evolved into a sovereign debt crisis, further into a crisis of the Eurozone and led even- tually to a political crisis of the entire EU. National political elites have been among the core actors to cope with these challenges. Their behaviour is driven by their Europeanness, i.e. their emotionally and rationally determined atti- tudes, cognitions and strategies regarding European Integration. Given their pivotal role, the purpose of this introductory article is twofold: Firstly, provid- ing an overview about the elitist approach to European integration by intro- ducing the main concepts, the methodology and the data basis on which the country studies in this HSR Special Issue rely on; secondly, enfolding a compar- ative perspective on the development of national elites’ Europeanness during the course of the mentioned crises. The article shows that the crises have af- fected national elites’ Europeanness in complex ways that are determined by the diverging impact they had on the investigated countries and by how elites perceive the efficiency of supranational integration to cope with them. Beyond national differences, the general evaluations of Europeanness remain quite sta- ble pro-European while preferences regarding the concrete organization of in- tegration are rather prone to change. Elites’ Europeanness primarily shifts in countries, in which strong Eurosceptic parties gained ground during the men- tioned crisis indicating that there is a challenge of responsiveness for the still overwhelmingly pro-European elites.
The Europe of Elites: A Study into the Europeanness of Europe's Political and Economic Elites
2012
In a moment in which the EU is facing an important number of social, economic, political, and cultural challenges, and its legitimacy and democratic capacities are increasingly questioned, it seems particularly important to address the issue of if and how EU citizenship is taking shape. This series intends to address this complex issue. It reports the main results of a quadrennial Europewide research project, financed under the Sixth Framework Programme of the EU. That programme has studied the changes in the scope, nature, and characteristics of citizenship presently underway as a result of the process of deepening and enlargement of the European Union. The IntUne Project-Integrated and United: A Quest for Citizenship in an Ever Closer Europe-is one of the most recent and ambitious research attempts to empirically study how citizenship is changing in Europe. The Project lasted four years (2005-2009) and it involved thirty of the most distinguished European universities and research centres, with more than 100 senior and junior scholars as well as several dozen graduate students working on it. It had as its main focus an examination of how integration and decentralization processes, at both the national and European level, are affecting three major dimensions of citizenship: identity, representation, and scope of governance. It looked, in particular, at the relationships between political, social, and economic elites, the general public, policy experts and the media, whose interactions nurture the dynamics of collective political identity, political legitimacy, representation, and standards of performance. In order to address empirically these issues, the IntUne Project carried out two waves of mass and political, social, and economic elite surveys in 18 countries, in 2007 and 2009; in-depth interviews with experts in five policy areas; extensive media analysis in four countries; and a documentary analysis of attitudes towards European integration, identity, and citizenship. The book series presents and discusses in a coherent way the results coming out of this extensive set of new data. The series is organized around the two main axes of the IntUne Project, to report how the issues of identity, representation, and standards of good governance are constructed and reconstructed at the elite and citizen levels, and how mass-elite interactions affect the ability of elites to shape identity, representation, and the scope of governance. A first set of four books will v This is an open access version of the publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
European Integration by Daylight (Comparative European Politics, 2010)
2010
It has become common to highlight the desirability of a more ‘politicised’ EU so as to counter the low visibility of its policy-making and the disaffection this may breed. Endorsing this view, the article argues existing contributions to the topic tend to give insufficient attention to the relationship between institutional settings and everyday life, and to underplay the significance of how political actors interpret and reproduce the social and political world. The article explores how one might reconsider these questions, drawing on some of the insights of cultural and pragmatic sociology to suggest that the important obstacles to further politicisation may be rooted in contemporary political culture. A contribution is thereby intended both to the topic in question and to a wider effort to supplement institutional perspectives in EU studies with those drawn from sociology.
1 Introduction: European integration as an elite project
Oxford University Press eBooks, 2012
Introduction: European integration as an elite project This chapter de nes the volume's key concepts and introduces the main research questions addressed in the following chapters. Following a review of literature dealing with the challenges of European integration, it focuses on the emergence of various forms of Euroscepticism, Europhobia, and Europhilia among di erent sectors of the national elites. The notion of Europeanness is introduced as a manifold and compound concept used to analyse di erences among the national elites surveyed in this study. Three dimensions of Europeanness appear: emotive, cognitive, and projective. Finally, the chapter introduces the explicit empirical questions addressed by the various chapters: from the question of the career perspective in a supranational scenario, to the problems of European socialization of national representatives and economic stakeholders; from the question of the elitemasses gap to changes in the domestic political discourse of party elite. The methodological and theoretical approaches utilized in the di erent chapters are also discussed.